In her first full-length non-fiction since the influential A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand explores 17th, 18th, and 19th-century English and American literature—and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and world, of what was possible and what was not.

"Coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self."

In Salvage, internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Austen's Mansfield Park; the ways that the practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live.

The scene is the act of reading; the book, another kind of forensics—a forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and from which she must recover. Or, if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography, and much more than a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.